The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack

Does the fact that we're humans bias the way we look at our fossilized ancestors? In this podcast, Curator emeritus Ian Tattersall argues that a long tradition of "human exceptionalism" in paleoanthropology has distorted the picture of evolution. He leads us through a world of discoveries, beginning with Charles Darwin 150 years ago, continuing through the Leakey dynasty in Africa, and concluding with the latest astonishing findings in the Caucasus. With tact and humor, Tattersall concludes that we are not the perfected products of natural processes, but rather the result of substantial doses of random happenstance.